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Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Eligible vs. fundable

Here's the sort of thing I think about in the shower:

So let's say you're a district with a 40% discount looking for a VoIP/Internet bundle for FY 2016-2017.  Well, next year 40% schools will have stepped down to 0% for voice, so you're only getting funding for the Internet portion.  When you create your evaluation, only the price of the Internet should be considered in the most-heavily-weighted Price criterion, right?

Not so fast.  The rule says that "you must include the price of the eligible products and services as a factor and that factor must be weighted more heavily than any other single factor."  Well, voice is an eligible service.  Yes, your discount for that service is 0%, but that doesn't make it ineligible.  "Not funded" is not the same as "not eligible."

So even though you won't get funding for the voice, don't you have to include the cost of voice in the price of eligible services?

That's good news for applicants, since it lets you choose the overall cheapest option.  And if you get 2 bids, both for $1,000, but one of them says it's $500 Internet+$500 voice and the other says $800 Internet+$200 voice, you can choose the latter, which gets you an extra $120/month in funding.

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